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Health & Fitness

Can Georgia produce more than peaches and peanuts?

Essay on the need for STEM education

Our children can become engineers or scientists in Georgia; they can be business owners, taxpayers, homeowners, auto and home purchasers, and investor’s not just a sad underemployed statistic. When they don’t finish high school, when they live in the poorest neighborhoods, when their teachers are not qualified to teach science or math, when they don’t have family or friends that have gone to college, where will they go, what will they do?

As much and as frequently as this reasonable pronouncement is voiced by educators and the segments of our economy dependent on a pipeline of students supported at home, prepared in our school systems, and trained in our universities, we don’t seem to be making any real headway. Sure there are a few bright spots as evidenced with the results of programs like the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering (SECME), but a comprehensive and fully coordinated effort remains un-sustained and elusive.

Educators and parents need to have trust in one another. Students in our elementary and middle schools need to see themselves as capable of tackling disciplined learning, and our school systems need to integrate STEM learning across the entire K-12 learning experience. The consistent impediment that I have seen over the past 30 years as a national advocate for increased participation by underrepresented minority students in the sciences and engineering is sustainability and lack of will.

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Leadership in the home, in the board room, in the classroom, in the ivy halls of higher education, and under the golden dome is spotty and too easily uses the “can’t afford it” excuse. Well we can pay for it now, or we can continue to have more expensive support systems and bail-out programs.

Georgia is a leading chicken (and egg) producing state. Georgia leads the nation in peanut production. Georgia is a leading peach producing state. Georgia has the opportunity to be a leader in educating and developing students who can think critically while achieving success in studying the sciences and engineering.

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Larry King

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